Childish Adults

by Adam on Jan.16, 2012, under Other Stuff, Personal Stuff, Projects, Web Design

It’s amazing, you know? Adults can be civilized until you threaten something they think is valuable. Take a recent experience. When a couple friends and I decided to stop maintaining a fan website (none of us had really done anything with it for literally years – and none of us had the time or money to put behind it), a few fans piped up and said they wanted to keep it around. So, okay. We discussed it amongst ourselves and them. After some period of time it was decided to let one guy implement some much needed security upgrades, and let someone else put up the old original site on their own server while a new version was written, optimized, and secured. Is that what happened?

Not even close. What followed was actually a bit of a nightmare… The basic conversation went something like this:

User1: I want it! I want it!
User2: No I want it!
User3: Let’s all have it!
User4: Here it is.
User1: Yay! I’m experienced, I’ll have it up!
User2: Me too!
User3: I’ll make some security upgrades.
User1: Okay, we’re having trouble, I’ve given it to my friend who’s more experienced.
User2: We finally got it, now, too. But we’re having issues with a database. I also got a friend helping with it.

So now we got as many as four different people working on this on at least 2-3 different servers. I mean honestly! We had grown adults bickering like they were back in Kindergarten.

Actually, here’s a bit of what I said:

What are we? Kindergarteners? I mean seriously. Does it only take an old website about a show that’s been dead and buried for over a year to get adults fighting over it like children?

Of course, I won’t mention names. There’s no need for that. But it kinda makes you wonder where society is headed when you have bickering like this on that kind of scale. And for what? A dead old website that hasn’t seen maintenance in I don’t know how long.

Oh and then one of the other programmers wrote a nasty little email that I won’t bother quoting here. In a nutshell, he thought I was being arrogant, self-righteous, and a moron for not admitting fault when he (supposedly – the jury’s still out on that) was an experienced PHP programmer who couldn’t make heads or tails of the code I wrote when I was 18 (and the first time I wrote a whole website, at that). What he failed to realize (because he was a late-comer and didn’t see 90% of the original emails) was that the whole point of doing what we were doing the way we suggested doing it was so that the website could be up while it was being rewritten and upgraded. Anyway, I wrote back to him and explained some of that and basically told him he was free to think all of that of me, but he needed to consider circumstances and things we might NOT know that could change our perceptions of a situation and/or someone’s attitude.

He didn’t bother replying. Probably for the best.